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Continued from page 2

The majority of the risk lies in not getting the product right and having to close the project down. But that is a reputation risk not a financial one, because Google will have laid out very little in cash. The hedge is "this is an experiment" and "we wanted to explore the possibilities and create some excitement". That's true and so is the final hedge - who lost anything by it really?

GE tried to do something similar with its healthymagination project, where GE promised $ 1billion for health research in an open innovation environment. GE's goal is to create a new type of ecosystem for cancer research. You may not have heard of it. The first segment of that consisted of selecting 5 groups to work on new cancer diagnosis, care and cure projects.

But look at the difference in scale. There look to be about 2,000 Explorer or developer devices and a further 8 - 10,000 for winners of If I Had Glass. And no way is Google going to spend $1 billion.